My SBC Collection

My SBC Collection
multimedia.cx

I think mine arrived like a year late as I recall but the hardware really appealed - a zynq dual core arm + FPGA - these are more popular now but back then this was the first I heard of these chips. The board came with the verilog for the hdmi out implemented on the fpga- as I recall there were some challenges building a bitstream like they provided from their source but it was so long ago I don’t recall the specifics, it did eventually work. I never succeeded at evolving their hdmi out into an hdmi in though, it turned out to be way more complicated to bring in an hdmi signal than to generate one - I’m not even sure if it’d be possible on the size of fpga provided.

Anyway that was all a sideshow - the real deal was the epiphany chip. I’m going from memory here so I could have this wrong but as I recall each core had a little ram and a fabric connecting it to other cores, so you could choose to use it like gpu compute - although that model wasn’t a great match because each core could branch independently without any real hassle but that then opened up the puzzzle of how to keep each core fed. Another strategy could be the deep pipeline approach like you’d take with an fpga. Treating it as you would a multi core cpu never really made much sense to me because of bandwidth limitations of the fabric.

It used to overheat quite easily but I just soldered on a tiny dc fan to the incoming barrel jack and that did the trick for me, if a little loud.

Anyway, a cool little chip. I still have the code as far as I got with my image recognition application, I was reading road speed signs and vehicle registration plates from images, I think I know what project I’ll have a play with this week!